and ashamed of his own fear, he backed away. Her hands and fingers dissolved, falling apart in a welter of disconnected bones. She fell forward and lay twitching on the ground. Even as he watched, her fatigue jacket and jeans sagged inward, stained dark by the blood and other fluids pouring out of her disintegrating body.
For what seemed an eternity, MacNamara stared at her in unbelieving dread, unable to look away. It was as though this woman were being eaten alive from within. At last, she lay still, already more a jumble of bones and slime-soaked clothing than an identifiable human corpse.
He scrambled upright, now hearing a gruesome chorus of tormented howls and groans and wailing rising from the tightly packed crowd around him. Hundreds of other protesters were reeling now, clawing and clutching at themselves as their flesh was consumed from the inside out.
For a long-drawn-out moment, the thousands of Lazarus Movement activists still unaffected stayed motionless, rooted to the ground by shock and sheer mind-numbing fear. But then they broke and fled, scattering in all directions - trampling the dead and dying in a mad, panicked rush to escape whatever new plague had escaped from the explosion-shattered labs of the Teller Institute.
And again Malachi MacNamara ran with them, this time with his
pulse hammering in his ears as he wondered just how much longer he might have to live.
Lieutenant Colonel Jon Smith lay in a tangled heap at the foot of the North Wing staircase. For a few tortured seconds he could not force himself to move. Every bone and muscle in his body felt twisted, bruised, or scraped in some painful and unnatural way.
The Teller Institute swayed, rocked by yet another enormous explosion somewhere on its upper floor. A hail of dust and broken bits of adobe pattered down the stairs. Scraps of paper set alight by the blast spun lazily through the air, each a tiny flaring torch drifting downward.
Time to go, Smith told himself. It was either that or stay and get crushed when the bomb-damaged building finally collapsed in on itself. Gingerly he uncurled himself and stood up. He winced. The first fifteen feet of his rolling, tumbling dive down the stairs had been the easy part, he thought wryly. Everything after that had been one long, bone-jarring nightmare.
He eyed his surroundings. The last wisps of red mist from the smoke grenade were dissipating, but clouds of thicker, darker smoke were beginning to roll through the ground-floor corridors. There were fires raging throughout the building. He glanced up at the ceiling. The sprinkler heads there were bone-dry, meaning that the Institute's fire suppression system must have been knocked out by one of the bomb blasts.
Smith pursed his lips, frowning. He was willing to bet that was deliberate. This was not a case of industrial espionage gone wrong or of simple sabotage; this was cold-blooded, ruthless terrorism.
He limped over to where his submachine gun lay. By some miracle the weapon hadn't gone off accidentally when it tumbled with him down the stairs, but the curved thirty-round ammo magazine was twisted and bent at an awkward angle. He hit the release catch and tugged hard on the damaged magazine. It was jammed tight.
He laid the submachine gun down and drew the 9mm Beretta. The pistol seemed unharmed, but the pain he felt made Smith sure he was going to have a Beretta-shaped bruise on the small of his back the next morning.
If you live to see the next morning, he reminded himself coldly.
Holding the pistol ready, he set off to make his way out through the burning, bomb-damaged building. It was easv enough to follow the path taken by the retreating intruders. They had left a trail of corpses behind them.
Smith passed a number of bodies huddled in the smoke-filled corridor. Most were people he knew, at least by sight, and some were men or women he knew well, among them Takashi Ukita, the chief scientist for Nomura PharmaTech's lab. He had been shot twice in the head. Jon shook his head in regret.
Dick Pfaff and Bill Corimond lay dead not far away in that same hallway. Both of them had been shot multiple times at point-blank range. They had been the senior researchers in the Institute's own nanotech group. Their work had been aimed at developing small self-replicating devices that would consume oil spills without further damage to the environment.
The farther he walked, the more coldly furious Smith became. Parikh, Brinker, Pfaff, Corimond, Ukita, and the